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In January 1962, at the age of 43, Nelson Mandela secretly left South Africa. It was his first trip outside of southern Africa. He returned in July, and was arrested in August - and then sentenced to life in prison at the Rivonia trial. Mandela’s task was to explain the mission of the ANC to the rest of the continent and seek political support, money and military training for its new military wing.

It was a heady, revolutionary time to be travelling around Africa. Newly-independent states were rapidly emerging, full of ambitions for a pan-African role in the world. But Mandela’s African journey proved to be much more difficult than expected. In this programme, we retrace the seminal moments in this journey around Africa – to explore how formative these travels in free Africa were on Mandela the man and Mandela the politician. We also examine his lasting legacy on the continent and the people he met. We tell the story through the personal recollections of the people or the relatives of people he met during his African tour and fellow ‘comrades-in-arms’.